Cover

Title Page, Copyright, Dedication, Epigraph

Contents

Foreword: Life Stories in a Human Rights Context

Human rights
increasingly
enter every aspect
of the modern
world, and the
day-to-day lives of people
in every country.
Milestones
have included
the adoption
of the Convention
on the Elimination
of Discrimination
against
Women
(CEDAW) in 1979, the Convention
on the Rights
of the Child in 1989, and the
World Conference
on Human Rights
in Vienna
in 1993. But implementation...

Acknowledgments

The editors
would like to thank our colleagues
and collaborators
at the Centre
for Life History
and Life Writing
Research
at the University
of Sussex,
the
Centre
for Life Narratives
and the Helen Bamber
Centre
at Kingston
University,
and the Departments
of Creative
Writing
and Human Rights
at the University
of Minnesota.
In particular
we acknowledge
our debt for the initial
vision...

Introduction: Life/Rights Narrative in Action

The Human Rights
Act 1998 (also known as the Act or the HRA) came
into force in the United
Kingdom
in October
2000. . . . The Act sets
out the fundamental
rights
and freedoms
that individuals
in the UK
have access
to. They include:

• Right to life
• Freedom
from torture
and inhuman
or degrading
treatment
• Right to liberty
and security...

Part One. Testimony

I-Witness

Transforming
traumatic
experience
into the written
word—as testimony,
memoir,
theater,
fiction,
or advocacy—can be a complex
enterprise,
as the
writers
in this part of the book attest.
If the trauma
has been caused
by an
authoritarian
state, it can also be a life-threatening one. Three of the writers
here—Emin Milli, Nazeeha
Saeed, and Hector
Aristizábal—not only found...

Beyond Narrative: The Shape of Traumatic Testimony

Abraham
Lewin’s
diary, posthumously
published
as Cups of Tears, documents
daily life in the Warsaw
Ghetto.
In these pages, he reflects
on both the impossibility
and the necessity
of expressing
his thoughts
and feelings.
For instance,
he describes
the day his wife, along with many others,
was transported
to
Treblinka:
“Eclipse of the sun, universal
blackness.
My Luba was taken away.”
He...

The Golden Cage: The Story of an Activist

How do societies
start to change?
By the power of words and by the power of
human stories.
You get inspired
by a story, and then another
story, until all
these ideas build up to shape your mind and your character.
I don’t believe
in
this ethos of heroism.
I don’t think that people
just suddenly
decide
they are
going to act; it all builds
up slowly
until they have to. Most people
in closed...

The Price of Words

My father
always
wanted
me to be a teacher,
an artist,
or a musician,
but my
fate brought
me to another
adventure,
and with a different
type of life.
I was only eighteen
years old when I started
working
in journalism.
My
father
was worried
for me: he knew that this is a troublesome
profession.
Nevertheless,
my determination
alongside
his pride in my eventual
accomplishments...

Out of the Inner Wilderness: Torture and Healing

Four a.m. A low-income housing
project
on the outskirts
of Medellín,
Colombia.
The whole neighborhood
shook as military
trucks
rumbled
into the barrio
on
the hunt for subversives.
It was 1982. I was twenty-two years old. We were living
under the Estatuto
de Seguridad,
a repressive
law that looked
on almost
any
opposition
to the government
as communist
inspired.
It was dangerous
to talk...

Part Two. Recognition

Recognition

I come to this project
not as a professional
historian
or theorist
but as someone
for whom questions
of memory
and history
have been of vital interest—and, indeed,
the note I want to touch on here is the deep interweaving
between
the two: between
subjectivity
and history,
individual
narrative
and collective
memory.
My concern
with such questions
comes, as it clearly
does for many of...

Protection

The photographs
on page 81 of asylum
seekers
are images
from protection,
an
installation
by the Australian
artists
Carl Warner
and Ross Gibson,
commissioned
by the University
of Queensland
Art Museum
as part of Waiting
for Asylum:
Figures
from an Archive,
a special
exhibition
held in June 2011 that responded
to
the asylum
seeker
archives
that are held in the Fryer Library
at the university.
These...

The Justice of Listening: Japanese Leprosy Segregation

Human rights
related
to illness
are quite often counterintuitive.
There is a need
to carefully
examine
whether
the stigmatization
of patients
in certain
contexts
constitutes
an unjustifiable
human rights
abuse, or whether
some treatments
that patients
would deem painful
or even abusive
can be legitimate
in such
circumstances.
People
suffering
from leprosy—or Hansen’s
disease—have...

Reimagining the Criminal, Reconfiguring Justice

The application
of critical
analysis
to the study of justice
and punishment
is
crucial
to understanding,
interpreting,
and challenging
the authoritarianism
of
state institutions
that appear
committed
to widening
the criminal
justice
net and
expanding,
exponentially,
imprisonment.
Indeed,
one of the strengths
of critical
criminology
is in the promotion
of a criminological
imagination
that confronts...

Part Three. Representation

“I Hear the Approaching Thunder”: The Lyric Voice and Human Rights

A strong
case has been made for silence.
Nach Auschwitz
ein Gedichtzu
schreiben,
ist
barbarisch
(To write poetry
after Auschwitz
is barbaric).
The German
cultural
critic
Theodor
Adorno
made his famously
severe
judgment
in 1949, barely
four
years after the killing
camps of the Third Reich were opened
to the world.
One of the aspects
of the Nazi genocide
that elicits
the greatest
repulsion...

The Fictional Is Political: Forms of Appeal in Autobiographical Fiction and Poetry

Cathy Caruth
has argued
that trauma
“is always
the story of a wound that cries
out, that addresses
us in the attempt
to tell us of a reality
or truth that is not
otherwise
available.”1 Much of the work in this collection
centers
on how, and
under what conditions,
life stories
of human rights
violation
are remembered,
told, heard, and recognized
and become
justiciable.
Caruth
and others
explain,
however...

Human rights
awareness-raising and promotion
frequently
rely on the inspirational
life story to engage
large audiences
and mobilize
supporters
for campaigning
and advocacy.
Not surprisingly,
the dramatic
lives of commanding
figures
in what Makau Mutua has termed
the “grand narrative”
of human rights
history
have proved
especially
attractive
to artists
intent
on producing
portraits...

Témoignage and Responsibility in Photo/Graphic Narratives of Médecins Sans Frontières

Médecins
Sans Frontières/Doctors
without
Borders
(hereafter
MSF) emerged
in 1971 out of its founders’
(both doctors
and journalists)
medical
aid work on
behalf
of those caught
in the Nigerian
civil war and a major flood in what is
now Bangladesh.
A legacy
of its founders,
MSF’s distinguishing
feature,
according
to its mission
statement,
has been its dual commitment
to provide
medical...

Representing Human Rights Violations in Multimedia Contexts

To understand
the ways in which an individual
life can illuminate
systemic
human rights
violations,
humanists
have placed
great value on the ways in
which stories
are told, represented,
and re-presented in various
genres.
Whether
these stories
come in the form of interviews,
films, memoirs,
novels,
news articles,
or photographs,
we feel that they will reveal
some sort of truth about human...

Part Four. Justice

Sugar Daddies or Agents for Change? Community Arts Workers and Justice for Girls “Who Just Want to Go to School”

Over the three decades
in which I have read and written
on life narratives
by
women, especially
those in the Global
South, no goal has been asserted
more
strongly
by women writers—from Nafissatou
Diallo
and Ken Bugul in Senegal
to Esmeralda
Santiago
and Maryse
Condé in the Caribbean
to the Sangtin
collaborative
of Playing
with Fire in India—than women acquiring
the education...

E-witnessing in the Digital Age

Since we published
Human Rights
and Narrated
Lives in 2004, the social
and structural
environments
of human rights
campaigns
have changed
significantly.
The
major change
we take up in this essay concerns
the use of technologies
and
their implications
for personal
storytelling
in human rights
campaigns.
These
technologies,
when deployed
in the pursuit
of social
justice,
affect
every dimension...

“Facebook Is Like a Religion Around Here”: Voices from the “Arab Spring” and the Policy-Making Community

Human rights
activist
Emin Milli’s
view of the role of Facebook
in the popular
protest
movements
of our age—that social
media is like a religion—provokes
an obvious
and important
question
that this essay sets out to explore:
if the
recent
revolts
in the Middle
East and North Africa
were mobilized
through
open social
media, why did no significant
actors
in the foreign
policy-making...

The Importance of Taking and Bearing Witness: Reflections on Twenty Years as a Human Rights Lawyer

For a long time I have been at the center
of human rights
discourse
as a practicing
Queen’s
Counsel,
chairman
of the Bar Human Rights
Committee,
and
director
of the Kurdish
Human Rights
Project
(KHRP), the Delfina
Foundation,
and more recently
Beyond
Borders,
a new Scottish
initiative
dedicated
to small-nation
dialogue
and international
cultural
exchange.
Yet it is only relatively...

Part Five. Learning

Using Life Narrative to Explore Human Rights Themes in the Classroom

This volume
has explored
the interface
between
life writing
and human rights.
It will, we hope, encourage
further
research
and collaboration
and conversation
between
these two fields.
This connection
reflects
the coming
together
of two
increasingly
defining
aspects
of our age—the telling
of the stories
of ourselves
and the campaigning
for the rights
of others.
While we can be confident
that...

Contributors

Molly Andrews is a professor
of political
psychology
and the codirector
of the
Centre
for Narrative
Research
(www.uelac.uk/cnr/index.htm) at the University
of East
London.
Her research
interests
include
the psychological
basis of political
commitment,
psychological
challenges
posed by societies
in transition
to democracy,
patriotism,
conversations
between
generations,
gender
and aging, and counternarratives.
Her monographs...

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